About The Novel

Raves & Praise

"Beautifully detailed and rich in exceptional characterization ... Curran's novel gently reminds readers that fantasy has a place in everyone's life, and dreams can come true. Uniquely uplifting and never didactic, this is a gem." -BOOKLIST, starred review

"With a masterful wit and clever twists, Sheila Curran has created an intricately woven mystery. Captivating, fast-paced, no-holds-barred storytelling, DIANA LIVELY IS FALLING DOWN defies pigeon-holing. Wrestling the complexities of motherhood, loss and betrayal, politics, the environment, and theme parks, it is at once intimate, domestic, and worldly. A debut to celebrate!" -Julianna Baggott, GIRLTALK, THE MISS AMERICA FAMILY, THE MADAM

"Brilliant, touching, and funny as hell, Diana Lively packs a powerful punch. A poignant and biting satire of contemporary family life, American business, ivory-tower academics, and trans-Atlantic cultural differences, this spirited romp through an Englishwoman's Arizona deserves a unique place of honor on any bookshelf. Diana is one of those stories that can linger forever in one's own memory and imagination, as a reference point for every new book that comes along, or even more, for life itself. Wry, engaging, and wise beyond words, Diana is bound to delight and amaze." -Carlos Eire, 2003 National Book Award winner, WAITING FOR SNOW IN HAVANA

"DIANA LIVELY IS FALLING DOWN is a terrific pick-me-up. You couldn't find two more disparate landscapes than Oxford, England and Arizona, and that's exactly what one British woman discovers when she crosses the pond to find herself a fish-out-of-water -- only to realize that for the first time in her life, this means she can stand on her own two feet. Filled with characters who make you laugh out loud even as they break your heart, this is a funny, warm, inventive, original book."
-Jodi Picoult, NYT bestselling author of VANISHING ACTS and MY SISTER'S KEEPER

Traffic

A year ago today I was begging my doctors to quit radiating my throat. I kept saying, "I'm cooked! I'm done! You're giving me the same radiation as you would a 300 pound truck driver. Can't we stop? Please. Pretty please?

At that point, I was only a few days from the end of treatment, and no, the famous Dr. Mendenhall did not stop but he did give me more pain medicine. (I was wearing a 100 mcg. Fetnenyl patch that would have felled the aforesaid truck driver.) Third degree burns to the inside of your mouth and throat and tongue are not the stuff of MY BRILLIANT CAREER. More like The Hurt Locker. Except I wasn't striding boldly into no man's land. I was curling into a fetal position and telling myself, "Just a few more days and you'll have made it through treatment without having to get a feeding tube." Lofty goals.

Sooo...all this to say that I am GRATEFUL to be well enough today to get on a plane and be able to READ tomorrow to a group of people from a book I wrote before I got sick about a woman who's convinced death is around the corner, despite all evidence to the contrary. A book I wrote in which one of the characters cannot make herself eat, and about whom, everyone else is worried sick. A book called EVERYONE SHE LOVED.

Since my name is Sheila and my family calls me SHE, the ironies reverberate. But on this day, I'm lucky enough to be cured, to have found the cancer in its early stage, to have had a wonderful insurance plan that sent me to one of the top five radiation oncology treatment programs in the country, and to have emerged from that grueling slash-and-burn ceremony with a very small chance of recurrence, reborn taste buds and even working saliva glands. (The things you don't know you'll miss until they're AWOL.)

Please join me. I'll be wearing a scarf made from my father's World War II parachute, and telling myself, a little old reading is surely something to celebrate. Hope to see any Bostonians I know there!

If you can't make it, or even if you can, here's a very homemade video that shows exactly what happens when you're Missing In Action and your dog has to find something to do with herself.

In the new Puritanism, if a book is extremely readable (i.e. accessible) it's also just not good for you in the same way that a more taxing (i.e. boring, difficult, obscure) read would be. I have friends who are determined members of the 'eat your peas' school of literature.

Not me. Not ever.

I truly want to be entertained. We have little enough joy in life and if I can enter someone else's dream with their words and not have a Brechtian interruption every few seconds, that's just wonderful. (Brecht believed that if you were entertained by art, then you couldn't be a revolutionary. That was BAD. Thus, he proposed that art should shake you out of the trance of fantasy that you had signed up for. Art should be be 1) unpleasant and 2) remind you that you were NOT a passive human being seeking escape but rather a very UNHAPPY person whose escape just back-flipped on them. I think he reasoned that if you were left uncomfortable long enough, you'd take to the streets. Kind of like, Entertainment is the Opiate of the People. The problem with that? Well, where do I start? First, well, having fun and thinking about issues aren't mutually exclusive. Real art wakes people up AND entertains them. More compassion was awakened by Dickens' pleasing stories than ever by James Joyce's tres difficil prose detailing God-knows-what-because-I couldn't-bear-one-more-word of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Shakespeare was people pleaser. He was also brilliant. Sapphire's book Push, which, I will have you know I put on my favorite books list in 2001 (see my old READERVILLE page if you don't believe me), is both really difficult AND really gripping. You can do both.

Okay. My point is this. Women (and men) needn't beat themselves up for wanting good old fashioned escapist reading. What the hell? Do we really need more reminders of unhappiness than our many electronic tethers that remind us of the catastrophe's ability to ambush ordinary people in ordinary lives? Hello? Earthquakes, I.E.D's, Tsunami's, religious vendettas, need I name one more?

Okay, I still haven't gotten to my point, which is to say that sometimes a GOOD READ just speaks for itself. So instead of the usual song and dance, I will show you the cover to Megan Crane's novel and if you click on the link that follows it, you will be taken to her website and can read the first chapter for yourself. It just made me want to read more. YAY! The woman has a Ph.d. in literature and she's put it to great effect in Everyone Else's Girl, at least as far as the first chapter goes. I've already ordered the rest of those pesky pages in book form and am just waiting for the mail to get here. So, without further ado.

Now, click on this link, which should take you to her website, scroll down and start the first chapter yourself. See if you don't agree that this woman makes you want to get into your p.j.s and under the covers.